First Choice Expeditions

First Choice Expeditions is a collection of travel companies offering unique, high quality, high-end vacation experiences to destinations around the world. Founded with the mission of merging best-in-class companies within the travel and tour operator industries, First Choice Expeditions is committed to providing discerning travelers with unforgettable adventure, luxury, cultural, and natural history journeys.

PROBLEM

First Choice Expeditions began using the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) Platform about 9 months ago against a custom model developed for their in-house reservations system.

With a central service team of seven people, Larry Frank, VP of information technology was responsible for all of the technology systems across most of First Choice’s North American companies. The team supports a multitude of products including custom reservations systems, Oracle Financials, and assorted business intelligence platforms.

As a long-time Oracle Discoverer and NoetixViews customer, First Choice users accessed Oracle Application data via Noetix’s business views. In addition, they leveraged NoetixViews to feed legacy BI platforms including generating data more easily into Hyperion cubes. “I’ve run NoetixViews against Oracle Receivables, built revenue cubes, and also created financial cubes in Hyperion using NoetixViews for Oracle General Ledger,” said Frank.

“Once I decided on OBI EE as the platform I wanted to use, I needed to figure out a way to make it work with NoetixViews,” said Frank. “The ease with which Noetix allows my team to develop and manage the reporting infrastructure and the amount of business views they provide our users is essential to our business.”

SOLUTION

For more than eight years, the company had used Noetix Generator for Oracle Discoverer to automate the process of building and populating an end user layer for Oracle Discoverer with the features and functionality of NoetixViews. Therefore, Frank’s team felt comfortable in their decision to select Noetix Generator for Oracle BI to speed the process of reporting from their new OBI EE platform.

First Choice built an OBI EE server with Noetix Generator and within a matter of days they had the server up and running using NoetixViews for Oracle Financials. “We were able to query against the database, generate reports, and move to the production environment in record time,” said Frank. “I built a dedicated server with the Noetix model and launched it against both versions of Oracle Financials (11i and Release 12) we have live in-house while slowly moving Discoverer users over to learn the OBI EE platform.”

Before Noetix, First Choice dealt with complex tables and enormous Oracle reports that were difficult to generate and modify. “The users, no matter what they did, didn’t have ad hoc capability or access to view the data in the way they needed,” said Frank. Nontechnical users were only able to run canned reports with no customizations. Noetix offered users access to the functional areas without relying on a technical resource to provide custom reporting.

RESULT

First Choice’s central service team found that implementing Noetix Generator for Oracle BI required little attention as the solution is almost entirely automated. “The tool inherits all the logic that is required to build the information model. It would be a huge undertaking to try and manually build that model against the views,” said Frank.

The organization is doing consolidated reporting across multiple companies, leveraging the OBI EE tool with NoetixViews. The users are empowered with the ability to slice their information across applications in the tool they prefer. “Noetix Generator helped us leverage a lot more than just the OBI EE platform because we feed legacy and other systems with NoetixViews as well,” said Frank.

First Choice is getting ready to implement NoetixViews for Oracle Inventory and NoetixViews for Oracle Purchasing as well as NoetixViews Cross Operations Extension allowing users to build reports across multiple organizational areas, combining data into a single business view.

First Choice continues to do a lot of BI work creating custom models using the Oracle tools. “I’m constantly looking for methods to innovate using custom BI models against travel business processes and Noetix enables me to do that by helping to slice our financial information using techniques that most companies in our industry don’t yet do today,” said Frank. “Instead, they perform canned implementations that only show a view of the relational transaction world. That’s just not the way to run a successful business, especially in more challenging economic times.”

“From an operations and labor perspective, without Noetix Generator and NoetixViews, we’d have a much more difficult environment to manage for both my IT team and our business users. I can’t imagine running an Oracle shop without Noetix.”

Larry Frank
VP of Information Technology
First Choice Expeditions

ABOUT

Magnitude Software, Inc. leads the way in delivering corporate performance insights through master data management (MDM), corporate performance management (CPM) and data connectivity in heterogeneous environments. The Company’s software and solutions drive real business results for hundreds of thousands of users around the globe. Magnitude’s family of award-winning solutions includes business intelligence, data warehousing, master data management, connectivity, analytics and reporting software.

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Chris Ney

Chairman and
Chief Executive Officer

As Chairman and CEO, Chris leads Magnitude Software’s corporate vision and strategic direction, driving the company’s acquisition, integration and growth strategies to extend the company’s global reach. Under his leadership, Magnitude Software has developed an unparalleled customer experience, strengthened its culture of innovation, and greatly increased profitability and shareholder value. In September 2014, Chris successfully secured up to $100 million in capital to further build Magnitude Software through product innovation, organic growth and strategic acquisitions.

Ney was previously Co-Founder and President of Silverback Enterprise Group, where the team completed the strategic acquisition of nine industry-leading enterprise software companies and leveraged their synergies to build two powerful new entities: Magnitude Software and Upland Software. Magnitude Software offers a family of award-winning solutions for enterprise performance management, master data management and data connectivity. Upland Software (Nasdaq: UPLD) went public in late 2014 and is a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise work management software with over 2,000 active enterprise customers and more than 235,000 active users in more than 50 countries.

Prior to co-founding Silverback, Ney was CEO of a series of Trilogy/Versata portfolio software companies. He previously served as Chairman of the Board, CEO and Founder of CoreTrac, a financial services CRM software company. Ney began his career working for investment banking firms Lehman Brothers and UBS.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Texas A&M University.

Kevin Mischnick

Senior Vice President,
Finance and Accounting

Kevin oversees global financial operations for Magnitude Software.

Bringing more than 25 years of financial experience to Magnitude Software, Kevin is responsible for a number of areas of the business, including Finance, Accounting, Legal and Information Technology.

Kevin’s background includes building and transforming financial teams into high-performing units, implementing systems and processes focused on cost savings and efficiency, and raising nearly $100 million in investor capital. He served as Senior Vice President of Finance for Multimedia Games Inc. and Capstar Broadcasting Corporation. Under his financial leadership, the market values of both companies increased more than tenfold.

Kevin is a certified public accountant and holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from Texas Tech University.

Bill Stephens

General Manager, Magnitude Applications

A seasoned IT and consulting executive with a 20-year track record leading teams to drive customer success across diverse industries, Bill previously served as BIAS’ Vice President of Services overseeing the successful delivery of solutions across the Public Sector and Commercial markets. Prior to BIAS, Bill served for over a decade at Oracle Corporation as an applications consultant, project manager, senior operations director, and consulting executive.

He developed the foundation of his leadership skills while serving as a Cavalry Scout in the Kentucky Army National Guard.

Bill holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Louisville.

Tony Fisher

General Manager, Magnitude Integration

Tony leads the Magnitude Integration business, driving strategy, revenue, product and operations as well as leveraging and integrating our Simba- and Innowera- based technologies for new Magnitude solutions.

An accomplished data management and big data marketplace leader, Tony previously served as the SVP, Business Development & Strategy at Zaloni, an award-winning enterprise data lakes management provider; prior to that role, he was Vice President, Data Collaboration & Integration at Progress Software, where he led the business line’s strategic direction and operations.

Prior to Progress, Tony was the CEO of Dataflux Corporation. He also served as Director of data warehouse technology at SAS. A key technology leader at SAS, Tony provided the engineering research and development direction that helped make SAS the market leader in data warehouse software sales.

Tony earned a Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Duke University.

Darren Peirce

Chief Technology Officer

As Magnitude’s technology guru and evangelist, Darren is critical to building on our position as a leading provider of software and services that help organizations tackle the challenges and opportunities inherent in digital information management.

Previously, Darren served as CTO and Group Vice President of Product Management at Kalido; prior to that role, he was the Lead Solutions Architect and Manager of Professional Services in the United Kingdom. He also worked in senior consulting positions for companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and British Telecom.

Darren received a degree in Management from Intec College in Cape Town, ,South Africa, and studied Economics at the University of Stellenbosch.

Mihir Shah

Executive Vice President,
Corporate Development and Strategy

Mihir is responsible for Magnitude Software’s acquisition and organic strategy.

Mihir has over a decade of experience leading acquisitions and strategy. During this period, he led several public and private company acquisitions, divestitures, and minority and majority equity investments.

Previously, Mihir was M&A Executive for IBM’s Information Management Software division, executing IBM’s inorganic strategy through M&A and strategic partnerships. He also served as Operating Executive for private equity firm, Golden Gate Capital, and as Vice President for Corporate Development at Aspect Software.

Mihir holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Master of Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Karen McPhillips

Vice President,
Marketing

Leveraging 20+ years of transformational marketing experience, Karen fuels Magnitude’s corporate and existing portfolio marketing, collaborating to maximize the company’s business strategy while also supporting integration of acquired products and services.

Karen has served on leadership teams of public and private companies of all sizes, transforming marketing functions and generating both tangible and intangible value. Most recently at PlumChoice, she and her team repositioned the brand and metamorphosed the marketing function in support of the company’s pivot from IT support provider to leader in the cloud services and Internet of Things spaces. At Iron Mountain and its technology arm, Iron Mountain Digital, she created new marketing functions, introduced the marketing operations discipline, and spearheaded a closed-loop leads-to-revenue framework coupled with a brand-to-demand communication platform that raised the bar on marketing’s revenue influence. Prior to Iron Mountain, Karen held marketing leadership roles with SaaS back-up leader, Connected Corporation (acquired by Iron Mountain), and SilverStream Software, contributing to the company’s IPO and acquisition by Novell.

Karen earned a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from St. Michael’s College in Vermont.